


Water to the Wind

by ShyZombie



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Merged Vanitas and Ventus (Kingdom Hearts), Stream of Consciousness, Traitor Ventus (Kingdom Hearts)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:27:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23325481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShyZombie/pseuds/ShyZombie
Summary: He looked at her, familiar, but not. A child, but his eyes had turned into windows over something dark and deep, and she was almost afraid to look and see them stirring. But when she blinked, they were blue again.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 26





	Water to the Wind

* * *

  


He looked at her, familiar, but not. A child, but his eyes had turned into windows over something dark and deep, and she was almost afraid to look and see them stirring. But when she blinked, they were blue again.

It would be selfish to expect him to be the same after everything. Aqua knew that. The past twelve years had changed her too. Still, she hadn't known what to expect.

To know that the boy you loved like a son was just (no not just, never just, that was the problem) half of someone else. Half of a stranger.

Even before the merge, upon his waking, Ven had told her about his dreams. He'd made her laugh with descriptions of strange colourful bouncing animals, before he sobered somewhat, hesitated. He fiddled restlessly in the way she recognized as him stalling. She had asked him what was wrong.

Just like that, his breath hitched. He tried to tell her in words that made less and less sense, searching her eyes every now and then only to pull back, as if disappointed when he saw no answers, only confusion and worry. He spoke fragments of strange masters in animal masks and a terrible book and a town that never ended connected to all places and a tower that tolled for lost hearts like a billion drifting lights and a war that ripped the ground and time and him and it all fell in pieces-

He looked up, eyes wide.

"There were no stars before."

When she asked what he meant, he shook his head. He smiled dimly and thanked her for listening, and told her she'd worried enough. They sat under the stars together, and both tried to pretend neither was as broken as they felt, for the other.

Now that he was glued back together, the cracks were more obvious than ever. He looked the same on the outside. Maybe to someone who didn't know any better he looked normal.

Had she ever really stopped to wonder why Ven was so important? Had she ever really wanted to?

For so long, what Xehanort had done to him was more important than why he had chosen him in the first place. She hadn't been ready to aknowledge that Vanitas was just as much Ventus as Ven was. It was still hard to reconcile that faceless creature of caustic shadow and it's legions with the pink cheeked child who'd come to them so empty, the boy she'd helped nurture until he was spilling over with laughter and light. 

Ventus was a happy child. He was dazzling in the hearts of all he touched. He had been her hope, a shining beacon of what the world could be if people were right and good, an affirmation of her most treasured values in human form. 

But he was also incomplete. 

They'd all thought Vanitas had faded. It wasn't until the battle was over that Ven had run. He had been the first to understand what she hadn't wanted to admit: that he could never again be the boy she remembered. 

Put back together, he was so much greater than the sum of a plague born from children's screams and the naive boy who lacked the capacity to feel anger or spite or jealousy (or to truly understand people who could). If Ventus was like the blinding sun and Vanitas was a bleeding red, then when the two mixed, they had exploded into all the subtle hues of twilight. With all the pieces again in one place, they could finally link together all the things that drifted aimlessly in both their minds, things that were to big for either of them to comprehend on their own.

Where Aqua thought of Vanitas, there was hollowness and desperation that felt a little like denial and a little like the realm of darkness. She had heard echoes of his laughter sometimes, saw glimpses of yellow catch in Ven's eyes like streaks of candle flame, and it could be hard to distinguish what had really happened from the nightmare. Maybe he was all nightmare, but he was also half of Ventus she hardly knew, was afraid to even look at. 

And the Ventus she'd known... Had actually been an even smaller fragment of a boy who had come into being with the birth of the universe, when all worlds had been one. He'd been a citizen of all existence and had seen the first keyblade war tear the very foundations of that existence apart. Then, less than half that Ventus, stricken of his darkness and memories, had merged his heart with a baby in the Destiny Islands. 

How much of the Ventus she knew came from Sora? How much from Vanitas? How much of his past had been stolen from him by Xehanort? 

She supposed Ven's departure had been his own answer to questions like that. Maybe even a kindness, or as close he could imitate. But Aqua hadn't spent a decade wandering the spaces between, never sleeping or eating or knowing the difference between enemy or friend or dream to let him go, and in the end, he couldn't deny her to her face. And so, it was his turn to let her live a dream.

It had gotten harder lately, because for all that had changed, he still had to dream too. Aqua wasn't used to sleeping anymore, couldn't sleep unless she could see Ven. Even then, to see him go so still again was like something cold constricted in her heart.

It was because she spent most of her sleepless hours watching him sleep that she caught glimpses of the things he tried to hide when he was awake. There was more talk of a book, muttered apologies, and a persistent, whispered word: 'traitor'. 

Sometimes, there were what sounded like names. _Lauriam. Skuld. Strelitzia. Strelitzia. Strelitzia. I'm sorry._ Yet when morning came, the only sign of distress would be the light rings under his eyes, easily hidden in the scrunch of a smile.

If Vanitas had been half of Ventus, then where had all that darkness come from? The thought made Aqua shiver. Not because she was afraid of Ventus, never that, but because she was afraid of the things he must have seen, those dark days that refused to let him go. Those days that refused to give him back to her, even now.

Presently, Ventus threw a wide smile like a net and tried to be himself by pretending to be Sora. The others became caught in it; it was infectious that way, but it was a smile that left him plastic around the eyes. 

He swung his feet over the edge of the clock tower and didn't seem to notice that his ice cream had begun to drip down the side of his arm. Look-a-likes sat on either side of him. They smiled real smiles, real because they didn't know Ven the way Aqua did. 

No one else noticed the way Ven stared through people rather than at them, or the moments when that gaze moved to twilight and turned something ancient and unfathomable. Only Aqua noticed, who had known him before he had understood what happy meant, and who knew what it looked like when he was pretending.

**Author's Note:**

> Diverges after Vanitas fades away in Kingdom Hearts 3- Ven and Vanitas merge, but the final product keeps it under wraps until Xehanort is defeated, before trying to slip away quietly on his glider. 
> 
> PS, this is probably AU in more ways than just one. I'm a Lovecraft fan, so I was constantly teetering on the edge of exaggerating Ven's role in the ancient past into something more eldritch-precursor than is warranted.


End file.
